March 1967: Gleason Introduces the Dead

DEAD LIKE LIVE THUNDER

San Francisco has become the Liverpool of America in recent months, a giant pool of talent for the new music world of rock.

The number of recording company executives casing the scene at the Fillmore and the Avalon is equalled only by the number of anthropologists and sociologists studying the Haight-Ashbury hippy culture. 

Nowhere else in the country has a whole community of rock music developed to the degree it has here. 

At dances at the Fillmore and the Avalon and the other, more occasional affairs, thousands upon thousands of people support several dozen rock 'n roll bands that play all over the area for dancing each week. Nothing like it has occurred since the heyday of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. It is a new dancing age.

The local band with the greatest underground reputation (now that the Jefferson Airplane has gone national via two LPs and several single records) is a group of young minstrels with the vivid name, The Grateful Dead. 

Their lead guitar player, a former folk musician from Palo Alto named Jerry Garcia (see This World's cover) and their organist, harmonica player and blues singer, Pig Pen (Ron McKernan) have been pictured in national magazines and TV documentaries. Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice has referred to the band as the most exciting group in the Bay Area and comments, "Together, the Grateful Dead sound like live thunder." 

Tomorrow the Grateful Dead celebrate the release of their first album, on the Warner Brothers label. It's called simply "The Grateful Dead" and the group is throwing a record promotion party for press and radio at Fugazi Hall. 

The Dead's album release comes on the same day as their first single release, two sides from the album - "Golden Road" and "Cream Puff War." 

The Dead, as their fans call them, got their exotic name when guitarist Garcia, a learned and highly articulate man, was browsing through a dictionary. "It just popped out at me. The phrase - 'The Grateful Dead.' We were looking for a name at the time and I knew that was it." 

The Grateful Dead later discovered the name was from an Egyptian prayer: "We grateful dead praise you, Osiris..." 

Garcia, who is a self-taught guitarist ("my first instrument was an electrical guitar; then I went into folk music and played a flat top guitar, a regular guitar. But Chuck Berry was my influence!"), is at a loss to describe the band's music, despite his expressiveness. 

The Grateful Dead draws from at least five idioms, Garcia said, including Negro blues, country & western, popular music, even classical. (Phil Lesh, the bass player, is a composer who has spent several years working with serial and electronic music.) 

"He doesn't play bass like anybody else; he doesn't listen to other bass players, he listens to his head," Garcia said. 

Pig Pen, the blues vocalist, "has a style that is the sum of several styles," Garcia pointed out, including that of country blues singers such as Lightnin' Hopkins, as well as the more modern, urban blues men.

"When we give him a song to sing, it doesn't sound like someone else, it comes out Pig Pen's way." Pig Pen's father, by the way, is Phil McKernan, who for years had the rhythm & blues show on KRE, the predecessor of KPAT in Berkeley. 

Bill Sommers, the drummer, is a former jazz and rhythm & blues drummer. "He worked at the same music store I did in Palo Alto; I was teaching guitar and he was teaching drums," Garcia said. He is especially good at laying rhythms under a solo line played by the guitars. Bob Weir, the rhythm guitarist, "doesn't play that much straight rhythm," Garcia said, "he thinks up all those lovely pretty things to do."

The Dead (they were originally the Warlocks) have been playing together for over two years now. They spend at least five or six hours a day rehearsing or playing or "just fooling around," Garcia continued. 

"We're working with dynamics now. We've spent two years with loud, and we've spent six months with deafening! I think that we're moving out of our loud stage. We've learned, after these past two years, that what's really important is that the music be groovy, and if it's groovy enough and it's well played enough, it doesn't have to be too loud." 

The Dead's material comes from all the strains in American music. "We'll take an idea and develop it; we're interested in form. We still feel that our function is as a dance band and that's what we like to do; we like to play for dancers. We're trying to do new things, of course, but not arrange our material to death. I'd say we've stolen freely from everywhere, and we have no qualms about mixing our idioms. You might hear some traditional style classical counterpoint cropping up in the middle of some rowdy thing, you know!" 

The eclectic electric music has won the Dead its Warner Brothers contract, offers of work in films, a dedicated group of fans who follow them faithfully, and the prospect of national tours, engagements in New York and elsewhere. But Garcia, who is universally loved by the rock musicians and fans, is characteristically calm about it all. "I'm just a student guitar player," he concluded, "I'm trying to get better and learn how to play. We're all novices."

(by Ralph Gleason, from the San Francisco Chronicle, March 19, 1967)

See also Richard Goldstein's Village Voice article and Gleason's interview on The Maze.

Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead - Digital Collections - Northwestern University Libraries